New Things
It’s a new year, it’s a new decade*, it’s our nineteenth wedding anniversary, it’s the middle of the night and I’ve just . . . finished PEGASUS.
More or less. Don’t break out the champagne**. I’ve got a short list of yanks and wallops I want to make before 5 pm Manhattan time tomorrow and I am not looking forward to seeing it back again covered in yellow sticky notes from the copyeditor in a few weeks but . . . yeah. I turned the last page about an hour ago and have been trying to remember what I do with myself in the end of an evening that doesn’t have PEGASUS in it . . . there’s this strangely half-familiar piece of furniture with the long narrow rectangular black and white tiles on top of a curious short shelf that make noise when you press them down . . . I have the feeling this odd contraption used to be important to me. . . .
And I need to go to bed so as to get up Bright and Early*** to get on with the yanks and the wallops. There’s quite a lot more to say on a subject that came up a little over a week ago, and I may go on with a little more of it tomorrow or next decade†, it being rather near to my professional heart, but meanwhile here are a few highlights from the forum responses to A Few Days Ago This Happened on Twitter:
librarykat
I have always done my best to review the book in hand and nothing else, and to make only fact-based, constructive criticisms if any are due.
Librarykat is talking about nonfiction, which has (perhaps) clearer lines of good/bad or successful/unsuccessful than fiction does . . . and while I’ll grit my teeth and toil on with a nonfiction book whose style and charm are failing me if the subject is fascinating enough, I’m such a dilettante that I may change my enthusiasm and go find a topic that has better books written about it. But I nonetheless feel that ‘fact-based, constructive’ still applies to everything. And many reviewers need to try harder to differentiate between their personal feelings and the facts of the book they’re reviewing, whether it’s about nuclear fission or the furry green frelp from the planet Girmingrum. And possibly to look up the definition of ‘constructive’.
hedgehog
Once upon a time I took a course with a Professor of Literary Criticism . . . who insisted that the Literary Critic was entitled to spout criticism as if the Author’s frame of reference was identical to that of the Critic. “A Tragedy Is What I Say It Is.” He didn’t see any reason to suppose that the Critic should spare any attention (or squander any column-inches) on the question whether his perspective and Author’s perspective had anything whatsoever in common.
This is the comment that is still spinning in my brain eight or nine or something (I keep telling you I don’t do maths) days later. He WHAT? I am, I’m afraid, assuming that he was a white Anglo-Saxon male, and . . . a lot of the reason why the world is in a total abject mess†† has a lot to do with similar attitudes from similarly gene-blessed blokes in positions of dangerously greater power . . . stopping now, before I get myself in more trouble. . . . But . . . . GRRRRRRRRRR.
LRK
I find it rather odd when people express their own opinion as fact: “This is good/bad”, not “I liked/disliked it”.
YES.
Of course there is such a thing as shoddy workmanship – I liken it to food: people like different things, yet there is such a thing as a badly cooked meal.
Or when they have made up rules for what is and isn’t good writing – sometimes I feel as if I hear “show, don’t tell” one more single time I shall scream! Not because I disagree with it as such, but you can’t just make up that kind of rule that is invariably right or wrong. Like a scene in a book I recently read – and I read a lot of comments saying that that scene was one of their (if not their very) favourite scene in the whole book. Then along comes someone and says they didn’t like it because it was an infodump! As is, presumably: Infodumps are bad; this was an infodump; ergo it is bad.
Yes. Some people can do the tangential wandering off into who-knows-where††† and some people can’t. Infodump/expository lump is not necessarily a useful elucidation.
The “opinion as fact” thing is especially striking when one oneself doesn’t happen to agree with it. This scene “is eyewateringly bad” I read somewhere else about something else. But… but… I thought, I liked it! And this author can’t write humour. Indeed? So why do I keep laughing then? . . . .
True, an excessive use of “I” can across as self-centered, but better that than sounding so… so… arrogant!
YEEESSS. This is one of the journeys of my cranky, self-centred and deeply unconfident life. I’m old enough—I think brainwashing, I mean educative styles have changed—that I remember that being taught how to write an essay included never using ‘I’. You were supposed to get your facts right and then staple them to the page. Uh . . . about nuclear fission this may be possible, but about a novel it isn’t. I remember it coming like Zeus on a thunderbolt‡ that there is no such thing as absolute objectivity. It’s all subjective. We can’t help it; we’re mortal. There’s a range of neon pink subjectivity fading into polite khaki almost-objectivity . . . but no mortal will ever make it to true neutrality, and anybody who says otherwise is . . . ahem. Let’s say ‘deluded’. And before anyone tries to blind me with science, there aren’t too many scientific laws out there that don’t turn out to have a few confusing corollaries.
Diane in MN
Of course there are books that suck dead bears, and while in some cases the author deserves to be soundly taken to task–e.g., for writing a nonfiction book that gets facts consistently wrong–the reviewer’s job is to discuss the book without trashing the author.
Bold face mine. Not to mention first usage of that vividly explicatory phrase ‘sucks dead bears’.
And a review that can be boiled down to “I really liked this book, so it’s good!” or “I really hated this book, so it’s bad!” might as well be a fifth-grade book report, because it’s not really a review at all.
Yep. Five-syllable adjectives and a nice turn of apothegm don’t alter this essential truth.
212Judy
I never did reviews for a living, but as am editor-in-training and then as an editor, the Rule was that even for in-house commentary and especially for anything going to the writer, we could NOT say that something sucked, or even “I don’t like this,” only “This isn’t working for me BECAUSE [fill explanation in here].” It was a useful distinction.
Yes. VERY useful.
Also was a chance to say, “this is SO not my kind of story that I’m not giving it a fair shot.”
Yes. Dear gods and goddesses in all the heavens and other unplumbable regions, I wish this reminder of legitimate grounds of refusal were written in letters of fire and stone over every review journal/forum/instrument/agency in the universe.
. . . And on that trumpet-blast of intellectual honour and righteousness . . . I have to go find out which frozen car door is going to let the hellhounds and me in tonight, with or without the application of fire and imprecation. The sky this afternoon looked like snow.
* * *
* And I want a better one, okay? No stupid frelling diseases.^ No frelling house moves that require me to reinvent my life as I thought I understood it. No dear friends lying crushed in hospital beds.^^ No more root canals.^^^ [Also Bleeeeaurgh, which is to say various things indescribable in a public blog because I’m only allowed to pillory myself.?] And I’d like to last out this decade with the current generation of hellhounds, healthy and eating well, not to mention this husband??.
I’d also like to keep the book-a-year-thing I’ve been doing lately.??? And the music lessons and the bell ringing. I don’t say it’s been a decade without virtues, just that I’d like the virtue/bloody awful bungle balance slightly realigned.
^ I got diagnosed with ME finally the autumn of 2001, after two years of Regularly Recurring Glandular Fever, which, as I’ve told you, is one of those classic scenarios. One of those classic scenarios you want no part of.
^^ Luke is, given where he’s starting from, doing very well. Which says nothing about how well he will continue to do. You can expect occasional Luke updates for . . . I’d guess the next two years or so.
^^^ Except I already know I’m screwed there. I have a redo pending . . . which I’ve been putting off till I got PEGASUS done. Whimper.
? And if I open it to global wishes, I’ll be here . . . all decade. Okay, let’s start with Obama pulling a whole series of hat tricks sorting America out and getting re-elected, saving the tigers and the rainforest, and that Copenhagen was just a bad dream and the real summit on climate change is next month and they’ve got it totally nailed.
?? Also healthy and eating well
??? Also AAAAAAAAAAAUGH. It’s the 3rd of January and I have ANOTHER novel to write by NEXT autumn. Winter. I really can’t do this last four months again. She moaned.
** No. Wrong. By all means break out the champagne. Always break out the champagne. And of course we broke out the champagne. It’s our anniversary.^
^ Nineteenth is bronze. Hunh. I don’t want a frelling statue. Is there any good bronze jewellery?
*** Cough cough. Ahem.
† Probably both
†† and why I’m a rabid, I mean rampant, no I mean rabid and rampant feminist
††† Possibly including footnotes. . . .
‡ preferably Athene on an owl, if you’re asking
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